Finding Justice in Evil Days
A sermon about the God who enters our troubles with us
Here’s something a bit different. In my sermon last week, reflecting on Matthew 6:25-34, I invited our church to reckon seriously with our troubled days while turning to the God who has entered our troubles with us. I offer it today especially for those who find yourselves in communities and congregations which, as I say in the sermon, have misunderstood the weight of this moment.
Introduction
Last week I received an email from a wise and spiritually mature woman in our church, describing her experience of the presidential election. With her permission, here’s a portion of what she wrote: “I have heard others say that they felt as though they had gotten slapped in the face the Wednesday morning following the election. I didn’t get slapped in the face, I got thrown to the ground and stomped on by 52% of this country.” If you listen to her closely, and the others in our congregation who feel similarly, you’d hear that this Black woman’s distress is not about one political party beating the other. It’s not even remotely about partisan loyalties. Rather, she recognizes and feels the impact of an election in which predatory and abusive behaviors were justified, in which racism and xenophobia were justified, in which disenfranchisement and insurrection were justified, in which Christian leaders twisted themselves into knots providing spiritual cover for corruption, authoritarianism, and deception.
In our passage, we find Jesus toward the end of his well-known Sermon on the Mount. The crowd who’d gathered to hear him were largely drawn from the 200,000-300,000 residents of the region of Galilee. Galileans were lower-class people, tenant farmers and day laborers. They’d felt the brunt of Greek and then Roman occupation; the burden of taxation and the threat of crucifixion were a constant menacing presence. It’s no wonder Galilee was known for its revolutionary activity. In these verses, Jesus told the Galilean crowd not to worry because God would provide for them.
Honestly, when I read these verses alongside headlines about mass deportations and appointments of credibly accused sexual predators to high office and reports of neo-Nazis marching in broad daylight through our cities … well, Jesus’ instructions to not worry sounded weak. Like, is that all you have for us right now?
But as I worked my way through the passage, I came to the last two verses, “33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
There are two words which brought this passage into our present, painful moment for me. First is the word righteousness which, in the Greek, can also be translated as justice. Spanish, like Greek, has a single word for justice and righteousness. So, verse 33 reads, “…busquen primeramente el reino de Dios y su justicia…” To be righteous or just is to be acceptable to God. This applies personally, as Jesus forgives our sin and clothes us in his righteousness, and to God’s heart for a world which reflects his character of justice. To seek the kingdom of God, then, is to seek God’s righteous justice, his just righteousness.
The second word is trouble, as in, “Today’s trouble is enough for today.” I hear trouble and I hear inconvenience, annoyance, or disruption. But this word is also translated as malice, wickedness, and evil. Seek first God’s justice…for today’s evil is enough for today.
Reading this passage from the bottom up brings into timely focus a fresh and necessary word. Here’s how I’ll say it: Evil days cannot conceal the justice of God. These days are not simply an inconvenience; a disappointment that this political party lost to that party. No, our days are fraught with evil as powerful people platform white supremacy, sexual assault, environmental destruction, and other manifestations of malice, wickedness, trouble. But no matter how much evil we face, and we certainly are not the first generation of Jesus’ followers to live through troubling times, evil cannot conceal the justice of God. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, his justice.” A few verses later, in Matthew 7:7, Jesus promises, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”
So, this morning I want to encourage you, especially those who’ve felt the weight of the past few weeks especially severely, I want to encourage you that nothing you face, no matter how evil, can hide God’s justice from you.
Trouble
The crowd gathered around Jesus on that Galilean hillside understood what it felt like to live through trouble. The words of Psalm 74 would have spoken to their experience. “9We are given no signs from God; no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be. 10 How long will the enemy mock you, God? Will the foe revile your name forever?”
When Jesus brought up food and clothing as the people’s objects of anxiety, he wasn’t choosing random examples to make a point. No, among that crowd were women and men, children and their grandparents who understood the concern of an empty cupboard, of a smaller-than-expected harvest, of failed fishing trips. They knew the sadness and shame that comes with watching your children wear out their clothes or outgrow their shoes without having anything new to adequately protect their growing bodies.
The worry Jesus put his finger on wasn’t the kind that comes from trying to get your child into a slightly better school, or realizing you’ll have to downsize this year’s vacation plans, or striving to get the ideal fellowship, or wondering whether he will message you back. We have all known those kinds of anxieties but what Jesus raises here is something deeper and more existential. What concerns Jesus in this passage are the threats to people’s well-being, flourishing, and even survival.
We need to grasp this because otherwise we’ll misunderstand what Jesus was up to on that hillside near the Sea of Galilee. We’ll hear him offering some vaguely spiritual-sounding tips for how to soothe our anxious nerves, as though looking at the birds and considering the lilies were a self-help tool to keep in our back pocket. No, by highlighting these essential necessities, Jesus took the people to the place of their true vulnerabilities, to the places where they needed actual provision and covering.
These vulnerabilities were not inevitable. The crowd that day was made up from the inheritors of Jewish law which consistently centered those most vulnerable to harm and exploitation: widows, orphans, and foreigners. This law, reflecting the character of a righteous and just God, ensured material provision in the form of housing and harvests, land and labor, investment and inheritance for the women and men who’d otherwise be stripped of their divinely designed dignity. But now, though they still tended their ancestors’ fields, these women and men had been reduced to an occupied and oppressed people. They were a people subject to the apprehensive whims of powerful men enthroned in Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Rome. Their worries about safety and survival, in other words, were not a foregone conclusion. They were the result of life-diminishing, life-threatening persecution disguised as public policy. When you hear Jesus tell the people not to worry about food or clothes, don’t imagine choosing between Aldi or Costco or about having to wear last year’s style when your friends have moved on to the latest thing. No, Jesus has cut to the heart of the people’s existence, their ability to survive the threat of imperial violence and domination.
It's at this point that I want to bring our attention back to our own moment. In the presidential election, 57% of white people voted for the now president-elect; so did 46% of Latinos, 39% of Asian Americans, and 13% of Black voters. Since then, I’ve heard many well-meaning people who voted against the now president-elect admonish us to not to worry simply because one political team lost and the other won. I’ve heard it said that Christians do not worship either the donkey or the elephant by the lamb. I’ve heard it said that because Jesus is king, we need not be anxious about who the next president will be. But with all due respect, and with Jesus’ voice in our ears, I want to suggest that this sort of advice is a serious misunderstanding of the moment.
Undoubtedly there were some in the crowd that day whose wealth, status, or political connections insulated them from the worst of Rome’s policies of terror and theft. For them, the invitation to not worry perhaps felt like an emotional assurance, that the concerns clouding their mind could be released as they gazed over their beautiful surroundings. Whether it was Herod or the next puppet king, Pilate or the next Roman representative, their lives would proceed relatively undisturbed. But by naming food and clothes, Jesus made it clear that he was addressing those in the crowd without the protective privileges bestowed by the empire.
Here's what I mean: The ability to interpret the election through a strictly partisan lens reflects a measure of privilege. Thinking about those elevated to the nation’s highest offices only through a political paradigm reveals certain assumptions about the security of our citizenship and the protection of our personhood, assumptions that cannot safely be shared by everyone.
If we are to hear what Jesus is actually saying about worry in the uncertainties of our post-election context, some of us need to renounce the privileged political formation that keeps us from reckoning with the truly worrying possibilities of a violent, predatory, manipulative, and vengeful man ascending to the most powerful position in the world.
Worried
Some of you are not just worried in this cultural moment, you have been purposefully made worried. You have been made anxious. The threats you’ve felt are not imagined. Three days after the election a teacher and member of the church, texted me. I share what she wrote with her permission. “What. A. Week. Exhausted isn’t the word. First period yesterday, one of my freshman girls tells me she needs to show me something. She was completely frazzled. ‘How did they get my whole name. Is this real?!’” Following the text was a screenshot of the student’s phone.
Good morning [student’s name], you have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation. Be ready at 5:00 AM November 25th sharp. Bring your belongings; you will be needing them. Our Exclusive Slaves will come get you in a white van, be prepared to be searched so don’t try anything. Remember you can’t run away we will know where you are. You are in Group Plantation F.
The worry is real because the threats are real, whether they arrive cowardly via anonymous text message or are announced confidently by those who will run the next government. Threats to voting rights, access to health care, to due process under the law; threats leveled at refugees fleeing violence, at migrant parents wondering if they’ll be separated from their children, at Black and Jewish citizens observing emboldened white supremacist groups… the threats are real and the ensuing anxiety more than understandable.
Did you notice how many times Jesus uses the word that can be translated as “worry” or “anxiety”? Six times, far more than any other place in any of the gospels. It’s as though Jesus understands the way worry works. Anxiety is not an isolated experience, siloed off from the rest of life. Worry compounds, connecting our experiences and layering over our embodied intersections.
As I’ve listened to women and men in our church during the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed this attribute of anxiety. It’s not as though the political and cultural turmoil around us is the only thing happening to you. It’s probably not even the most important thing happening to you. Some of us are stumbling through a marriage. Some are fatigued by a long and thus-far futile job search, or overwhelmed by debt, or turned upside-down by an unexpected drop in mental health, or concerned that a desire for children will remain unmet, or discouraged by chronic pain, or restless about the wellbeing of a daughter or son, or frustrated that the long-time friend still hasn’t experienced the saving love of God, or, or, or…
Worries aggravate and exacerbate. They slosh and spill over the tops of the heart compartments into which we’ve tried to contain them. It seems to me that the election and its surrounding circumstances have acted like a giant agitator, shaking and stoking our worries so that they crash against each other. “Do not worry about your life,” says Jesus. But the cumulative impact of his words – worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry – reveals a compassionate understanding of our human experience. Jesus of Nazareth knows what it’s like to inhale the anxiety of his surroundings. The way worry works is not a mystery to him.
In 1885, the journalist, newspaper owner, and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells published the results of her investigation into the lynchings which were then a staple of white supremacist violence in the Jim Crow south. Her old friend and mentor, Frederick Douglass, wrote the foreword for the book, Southern Horrors and Other Writings. In it he provided this insight which remains relevant for our times.
Brave woman! You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if American church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
But alas! Even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence.
It is Douglass’ lament that the country refused take his friend seriously which causes me to pause every time I read this. If, if, if… they would just believe you, a scream of horror would rise to heaven over the terrible truths you have revealed. But alas!
In the recent election, 91% of Black women voted for Kamala Harris. And if you can only hear that statistic through the lens of partisan loyalties, you’ve not been listening. Consider, those of us who are not Black women, this country’s long history of racialized and sexualized violence. Consider the traumatic legacy of children torn from mothers’ hands, threatened in our streets, or consigned for profit in prison. Consider that neither of this nation’s political parties has ever truly represented your best interests. Ida B. Wells herself once ran for public office as a Republican, when the party of Lincoln was the least bad option for African American citizens. Consider the burden that comes from constantly calling this country to be better, from warning this country away from its worst instincts. Consider the weight that comes when your testimony to the deadly presence of malice, wickedness, and evil is met not with a scream of horror, shame and indignation but with a shrug, with debate, with an interrogation of your Christian faith because you dared to vote for that party instead of this party.
I imagine some of you, waking up on November 6 troubled and worried. Once again the majority of your fellow citizens ignored your warning and drowned out your prayer. I’ve thought about so many of you during these weeks as you’ve carried grief and worry, lament and anxiety, anger and rage into spaces that could not be trusted with your experiences, that could not be bothered with your emotions, that could not be troubled to notice your trouble. I’ve thought about the loneliness some of you have felt, the reawakened uncertainty about neighbors and coworkers, about whether your life and its hopes and vulnerabilities factor even a little bit into the vision they carry for their own futures. I hear the detached political punditry, I watch the attempts of progressives signaling their virtue with bumper stickers and blue bracelets, I observe the tepid attempts by privileged pastors to walk the political tightrope and here's my confession: I am angry.
I am angry that the people Jesus singled out for protection and assurance during his hillside sermon are willfully ignored by so much of the American church. I’m angry at the extent that American Christianity cares more about keeping a false peace than in telling the truth. I’m angry that the evil knocking at our doors is treated by so many as theater or sport. I’m angry that some of us are so dreading awkward political conversations over the holidays that we’ve forgotten our neighbors who are making contingency plans for if mom gets detained, if dad gets deported.
Sanctuary
I have to believe there was also anger behind the worries represented in the Galilean crowd. Disappointment, sadness, and grief too. The individuals in that crowd would recognize your emotions this morning. I imagine them listening in on your inner dialogue, nodding along with empathy and understanding. Some had tried to address their troubles by currying favor with the empire, assimilating to Greco-Roman power. Others had gone the other direction, the way of insurgent violence. Yet here there were, gathered around the man whose presence pointed to another way. Not to some bland both-side-ism or safe centrism. After all, what kind of peace can be made with a regime that finds as much use for you dead as alive? No, what drew the people to Jesus was an experience unlike any they had known.
What they sensed was not spiritual escapism to deaden their worries. It wasn’t the revolutionary promise of perfectly applied violence. No, it was something else entirely. For while those gathered in the meadow around Jesus longed for God to remove them from the wicked that surrounded them, what they found instead was that God had entered into their wicked days with them.
Listen again to Jesus’ invitation. “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” And then, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” Do not for a moment think that to a people who knew what hunger felt like, who knew what poverty felt like, who knew what exposure to the deadly elements of imperial greed and theft felt like, do not think that to this people Jesus was offering trite clichés meant to distract them from their lived vulnerabilities. No, it was a different invitation Jesus made that day. Something more surprising but also sturdier, stronger, and surer.
By redirecting the crowd’s anxious attention to the evidence of God’s providing presence all around them – satisfied birds and well-clothed flowers – Jesus was claiming the presence of God for them right there and then, on that hillside, in the midst of their troubling circumstances. Look around, Jesus says. This is God’s holy sanctuary.
And perhaps more than the crowd could grasp that morning, Jesus was putting the forces of evil on notice. No longer could trouble foreclose on a people’s hope. No longer could malice and wickedness bar the door to redemption and liberation. Because the man sitting among the people, directing eyes worn out from weeping to look at the birds and the flowers was the God who had made the birds and the flowers, was the God who had made their hilltop perch and the lake off in the distance, who had made the land beneath Caesar’s feet and the sky above Herod’s head, who watered their farmlands and stocked their sea with fish, who placed the stars above their heads and set the earth on its rotating path.
Look at the birds and consider the lilies, said the man who refused to downplay the people’s trouble, who refused to spiritualize oppression and injustice. It’s like he asks the crowd, do you hear the testimonies proclaimed in birdsong and exalted in rustling grasses and stunning blooms? Do you see that the maker of heaven and earth has turned this outdoor amphitheater into a sanctuary of praise? Do you see the table of salvation your heavenly father has set for you in the presence of your enemies?
Before anything else, Jesus’ invitation not to worry is an invitation to draw close to him. No ruler or king could keep him from those he came to save. No principality or power, no malice or trouble, no rebellion or sin, no spiritual force of evil could keep the Son of God from entering the circumstances of our actual lives. Seek first my kingdom and my justice, Jesus says and he can say it not as a one-day promise but as a today-reality because the kingdom’s king has come. The king has come and righteousness and justice have come with him. The king has come and truth and mercy have come with him. Seek and you will find, Jesus says, because Jesus himself has come.
On Monday I woke up feeling overwhelmed. The weight of these days seemed especially heavy and I found my heart aching for many of you as you live with your grief, fear, and anger. As I do most mornings, I sat down on our couch and opened my Bible to the Psalms. On Monday, my bookmark opened to Psalm 73 which is titled “Pleas for Relief from Oppressors” in my Bible. Of the wicked who prosper, the psalmist writes, “5 They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. 6 Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment. 8 They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression.”
The psalm continues to rehearse these injustices until it reaches verse 16. “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task.” That’s right, I thought. It’s wearisome to watch the powers of corruption, violence, and greed win once again. It’s wearisome to watch the righteous groan under the burden of slander, exploitation, and fear. But then, in verse 17, came the unexpected turn. “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end.”
Until I went into the sanctuary of God. And then the psalm ends with this: “But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, to tell of all your works.” In the psalmist’s testimony I hear an echo of Jesus’ invitation to seek the righteous kingdom of God. Though surrounded by trouble on all sides, though besieged by profane displays of blood-drenched wealth, though inundated by headlines announcing the victory of yet one more tyrant, the psalmist finds himself stumbling into the sanctuary. He finds a refuge in his time of trouble. He finds a God whose closeness is not negotiable. And in the sanctuary, in the presence of God, the psalmist says, “then I perceived their end.”
In other words, when we become aware that the presence of the living God is with us in our trouble, we start to see more clearly. From the sanctuary of God, oppression’s façade of strength starts to crack; the inevitability of injustice is overturned; the lies spun into society’s fabric by powerful men are exposed. From the sanctuary of God, the people of God can proclaim to every purveyor of trouble, to every source of malice, to every stronghold of wickedness, and to every manifestation of evil that, “The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.” (Psalm 9:9)
In closing, then, enter the sanctuary of God. In these evil days, hear againJesus’ compassionate and knowing invitation to look, to consider, to recognize that it is good to be near God. And because Jesus brought his kingdom of justice and righteousness you can always and everywhere be near the God who is righteous and just.
Prayer
Open our eyes, that we might look upon your presence. Open our hearts, that we might consider your faithfulness. Lead us into your sanctuary, that we might know the end of all malice, wickedness, trouble, and evil. Be near to us now, our healing God. We take refuge in you, a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Amen.
(Photo credit: Lukas Hartmann)
The View From Here
On Wednesday Maggie and I drove our boys and a bunch of their friends over to one of our favorite trails at the Indiana National Lakeshore. That’s them, off in the distance, racing back to the cars motivated by the promise of an early dinner at Culver’s.